Medical Self Diagnosis Via The Net
I don’t often talk about myself personally over the net because I figure that’s not really what people want to hear about. But I’m going to make a brief exception now if you’ll indulge me.
I have epilepsy and I’ve had it since 1988. Since it’s been 20 years, you could say I’ve learned to live with it and since I work for myself over the web, the epilepsy isn’t too much of a hassle. If I have an attack, I will eventually wake up, dust myself off, pull myself together and eventually get on with my crappy day. It used to be tougher when I was working for other people and they didn’t understand what the hell was going on (”Is he POSSESSED?”) but now that I’m my own boss, it’s become progressively easier. I mean, I’m hardly likely to chew myself out now am I?
But the doctors are always looking for ways to make my condition more stable so they have been constantly pushing me to go to a specialist clinic about 120km away from here. Initially I resisted (I can be a prickly kind of patient - think of Toby Ziegler in the “West Wing” - that’s me) but in the end, everyone just wore me down and I eventually agreed to finally get a quiet life. So on Friday I headed on down there. It’s quite a big place, very well known and very hard to get into. It has a waiting list of about 9 months and in actual fact I had previously turned down the chance to get into the place once before so I am lucky to get a second chance. Apparently not many people get a second chance (so I am told anyway).
Once I had registered at reception, we went through the usual routines - intensive medical history, blood tests (LOTS of blood actually - I was starting to think they were Dracula clones), then an EEG and this one was actually different. This one involved putting wires on my eyelids to measure the rate of my eyelids blinking. I was later told I had an “abnormal rate of blinking” (whether that’s bad or not, I don’t know. They didn’t elaborate). I didn’t realise that it was bad to blink too much. I guess you learn something new every day.
Apart from that it was a fairly OK meeting with the doctor. Before leaving at the end, he asked me if I was interested in brain surgery to get rid of the epilepsy. Now I told myself that if he broached this subject, I would say no and get out of there. But you know, once he started talking about it, I found myself listening to him. You know why? Because I realised that all the information that I had been fed over the years about brain surgery was TOTALLY BOGUS. Over the years, I have talked to epileptic sufferers about brain surgery and they have fed me horror stories which have totally put me off the whole thing (as you can imagine). So sitting there in the doctor’s office, listening to how the medical procedures would be performed, it became completely obvious to me that I had been fed a load of bull over the years and this made me….well I don’t really know how it made me feel to be honest. It became obvious to me though that everyone I had talked to had probably logged onto the internet and looked up “brain surgery for epileptics“. They had then listened to and read every story they had found without bothering to check on the accuracy of those stories. So I suppose I felt stupid because I didn’t check on those stories either. I just chose to believe them.
As a child, did you ever play Chinese Whispers? Where you whispered a sentence in the first ear then the next person whispered it in the second ear and so on? You can be guaranteed that by the end, the sentence would be totally different. Well that’s how these stories mostly get started on the internet. One epileptic sufferer hears something, then passes it along, who passes it along and so on. To a certain extent, I can’t blame them I suppose. Epilepsy provokes a great amount of fear and fear makes you do things you wouldn’t normally do such as believe stories you wouldn’t normally believe in. Normally when someone tells me something, I immediately check the facts by looking for another source. But in this case, I chose to believe it right off. I can’t explain why.
My mother who is a nurse, hates people who do that. She hates people who self-diagnose themselves on the internet. I started to do that a lot when I eventually had complete access to the net. I would diagnose myself relentlessly, looking for better medications and better treatments. But I eventually learned that this is self-destructive because with the nature of the net, you will always see what you want to see eventually. You will always find someone who will tell you what you want to hear eventually. It isn’t worth it in the end. Better to find a real doctor who will diagnose you properly. The internet is not a doctor. Only a human doctor with a M.D. is a doctor. The internet is not, and never will be, a substitute.
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